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“Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

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Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#51

Post by Cthulhu_ »

bombcar wrote: post #42
ridaj wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about security. It's about wasting reviewers' time. I too would be annoyed if someone was submitting, say, whitespace-only changes, or similar cleanup, non-functional changes - I still have to review them and my time would be better spent looking at actually meaningful changes that make the product better. It's OK if someone is just learning the ropes with an easy change, but this seems to be more like peopl…

I think the proper way to do a “cleanup” patchset is to communicate with the maintainer beforehand and ask them what they’d prefer

Or as the maintainer themselves have indicated, bundling a number of these changes together along with a cover letter explaining them.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#52

Post by nevinera »

roenxi wrote: post #29

Is there anything going on here that suggests this is not a routine maintenance issue? The Kernel maintainers have a lot of people who want to submit code to the kernel, and have to maintain standards. I'd imagine there are a lot of emails like this one. Good on Huawei if they are incentivising open source contributions. Shame on them if they are wasting OSS maintainer time. Presumably well done Qu for promoting some…

It's not nefarious, it's a pattern of a particular company trying to game a metric, to boost their reputation.

Pretend you were a dev, and your effectiveness was mostly described within your 500-engineer department in terms of "how many pull-requests" you merged each month. In the abstract, that seems like a reasonable metric to use - it does seem to correlate with actual output, and encourages smaller slicing (which is generally positive). But two years down the line, you find this one guy, consistently in the top 10 rankings, and you feel like he's just not accomplishing that much, so you start looking into his actual workstream. And you find that he does do normal work, but he produces 10 times as many 1-5 line PRs as the average, each of them adjusting some bit of copy or changing an error message. For the better! And his QA isn't bothered, because his work is very easy to verify.

But he's not actually one of the most effective devs in the company, and it's really irritating that his process-games (a) seem to work (the VP of engineering definitely knows him as a 'high output engineer') and (b) impose some unnecessary load on other bits of the company's process (like the QAs and burning CI credits).

That's the emotion in play here. "Stop wasting our time, we can see what you're doing."

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#53

Post by Cthulhu_ »

hundchenkatze wrote: post #23
ma2rten wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These small patches create some overhead for maintainers. He actually said in the follow up message that grouping them together is fine. Please at least merge all those small fixes into a larger patchset, and with a good cover letter to explain the reason (and auto-tool to do the change if possible) for all the involved maintainers, so that all of us are on the same page.

I understand the overhead, but it seems like bundling lots of unrelated cleanup fixes into one large commit would make it easier to sneak in something nefarious.

I'd argue it would make it LESS likely; seeing a hundred "cleanup" merge requests that are all basically the same thing vs a single one where something more than just cleanup would stand out.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#57

Post by layoutIfNeeded »

quyleanh wrote: post #19

> "you're really just damaging the already broken reputation." Actually, with this email and the viral on HN, I think this quotation is true for Qu Wenruo. He/she has just damaged the already broken reputation. Not only Huawei, but also other companies will take a look at this accident to get the learned lessons.

Oh no! Won't somebody please think of the companies?!

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#58

Post by dangerface »

hashhar wrote: post #12

Without any context it looks like someone overreacted. It's essentially saying anybody else than Huawei sending cleanup patches is welcome but Huawei is not. Then they try to backtrack that statement by putting out a long list of things which aren't comparable in complexity to the original topic. Without more context I bet this thread is going to go off-topic.

I think the missing context is that Huawei is one of the largest technology companies in the world, every thing they do is built on linux, improving it would improve their business but their contribution to the project is a spell checker. Ok but clearly not their finest work.

NSA has implemented backdoors in software through bug fixes that appear to be just benign typo or spelling fixes but actually allow an exploit in combination with some other exploit etc. To any one accepting the patch it just looks like a typo fix maybe a little odd but nothing dangerous.

Huawei have the people with the skills to do really impressive work but they spend that time and resources fixing typos, this is a little odd.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#59

Post by phkahler »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #9

I see that these "cleanup" patches are not bringing much value, bust I also don't see why fixing spelling mistakes or log messages is considered as harmful, KPI boosting or not. The maintainer even said if someone else sent those patches it would be OK, but not if Huawei employees do it. If they distrust Huawei so much, why not just ban them from committing, the same way they did recently with university "security re…

>> I see that these "cleanup" patches are not bringing much value, bust I also don't see why fixing spelling mistakes or log messages is considered as harmful, KPI boosting or not.

My best guess: It creates a small amount of work for a maintainer to review and merge. This is worthwhile if a new contributor is learning their way around, and getting new contributors is very important to an OSS project. To have a large company submitting a bunch of these is a distraction for maintainers who have better things to do than support someone trying to inflate their metrics.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#60

Post by jacquesm »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #9

I see that these "cleanup" patches are not bringing much value, bust I also don't see why fixing spelling mistakes or log messages is considered as harmful, KPI boosting or not. The maintainer even said if someone else sent those patches it would be OK, but not if Huawei employees do it. If they distrust Huawei so much, why not just ban them from committing, the same way they did recently with university "security re…

The easy solution would seem to be for the person accepting the patch to check a box that says 'this patch materially improved the codebase'. That would put an instant stop to gaming the KPIs.
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